


Metempsychosis

by GulJeri



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Cardassian afterlife, Dark, Ghost Fucking, Hebeitian things, M/M, Reincarnation, Weird, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 13:06:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9125059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulJeri/pseuds/GulJeri
Summary: Damar is waiting in the dark, strange, afterlife for his re-birth. But Damar isn't really one to wait patiently, and there is someone reaching to him from the other side.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a weird story. I wanted to do something really out of the box, and visually creepy, and just... bizarre and surreal. I also wanted to write a 'Damar lives' story but I wanted it to be something unique. So... hopefully I have done that. I was trying to think of Tim Burton, and Salvador Dali while I was writing this, for inspiration on the dark-and-strange. I hope it works. Anyway, it was quite fun to try this.  
> Note- I don't know why this says 'chapter 1'. It's not a chapter story and I didn't mark that when I posted it. Sorry.

Damar exists on the edge of a hot pool, a crevasse swirling turquoise, with strands of black like veins, and bits of whitish foam that streak gently through the warmth like curls of moonlight. He perches at the edge where the black stone is split and craggy, perches like a bitter old regova digging her talons into the edge of a dead nest. The pits that are her eyes bore like holes into the empty chasm of her nest. All the eggs inside are broken and the shells have turned to dust.

Naked he crouches by the pool. Occasionally he tilts his head, remembering the sky, but there's no light there. It is full of shadows and eerie half-awake things that are shapes of things that are not quite things. Yet they feel sometimes as though they have eyes, and whispering voices, voices that scratch against his ears with no meaning at all. Sometimes Damar reaches forward with his hands twisted in gnarled claws. He reaches towards the swirling maw and waits for something to reach back. Sometimes he gets up, and moves to the other side, and perches again. The view is the same. The sky of specters creaks above him, moans, and weighs heavily down upon him like stone. His shoulders curve and his back bends, his head tilts down to watch the pool. 

There is nothing he must do but to wait. This is what he has been told. He wonders how long but there is no answer to that quandary and time passes oddly here. Not at all, and yet always; dust, and bone, and darkness. 

Sometimes Damar reaches back through dense fog that has clouded his mind. He pushes himself through it looking inwardly for something, for something—but then he must come out again and watch the pool. If he does not watch he might miss his chance and then he would be lost forever. Yet around the edges of the fog, and somewhere deep within the pit of it, there are things he remembers but does not grasp. There are dusty fingerprints made of warm, gray, sand. There is the clatter of armor but he does not recall why he wore it, or for who. There is laughter but he knows not whose mouths expel it and the little snatches of it are distorted, too joyful, too young, to be caught in this place. He remembers the light and yet the flashes have no meaning. They sear into his chest and mangle it into scars. He doesn't know who sent them to claim him. He doesn't remember closing his eyes.

Damar stares down through lank curtains of his hair. He reaches forward. His hand is held over the turquoise swirl and it curls, and trembles, and waits.

-x-

Garak sits in the gray sand and hugs his knees to his chest. A day of digging bodies out of rubble has splintered his mind again and he almost wants to laugh as the glass shards push out and stab against the insides of his skull. He waits and sips the scent of rain that draws near but refuses to burst, to drip, to drain. He knows that the doctor will come to him with the evening. He watches the horizon as it rises to lick the underside of the pink and burning sun. The sand is growing cooler. The rain is about to come.

Parmak supplies him with his nightly sedative. Garak hates to take it and yet he knows that he will. The dirty gray skin on the doctor's hand shifts to brown, the dainty hands become stretched with long fingers, and ragged Cardassian claws are Starfleet regulation trimmed and tidy. Just for a moment or two. Garak breathes deeply. The dust clogs his nose, and his throat, and the hand lifts from lying image to smooth reality. 

“You've scraped your knuckles,” Garak says, his voice seeming to come to his ears through a haze. For a moment he thinks he can see right down to the glimmering bone.

“My hands do many things these days,” the doctor says, “bleeding is only a service to the State.”

Garak nods. He backs away into the dark little cove of his shed. He holds his escape to his chest and feels the hum of his heart—how it continues to beat when it is so broken, so twisted, so cold—he does not know. But it thump, thump, thumps, and the rain pats down, and Garak watches it fall in silver droplets framed by his open door.

He swallows the pill without water and keeps gulping until it's not stuck in his throat. Now he has only to wait. It is the only thing that makes him sleep now. But it gives him very odd dreams. It brings him spirits, and memories that aren't quite his, and yet he knows them as though they were. He walks through the rain leaving his body behind and the drops shimmer, and change, and trace strange patterns onto his dirty, naked, skin. 

The children rise from the rubble. They watch him through vacant eye sockets, they reach for him with blood-stained hands, and when they open their mouths to beg that he take them, they are silent and spill sand from their jaws. Garak passes them. His feet sink into the sand. He moves but he does not feel it. He watches but he does not know what he is looking for. The sky grows darker above him. Garak pauses, and looks. What stares back at him is a void and there is nothing but darkness yawning, stretching, gaping. 

What is it? Where is it? Who is it, and why?

The questions float and hang without answers. Garak watches.

The sky splits above him. There is a glowing, turquoise, seam. It is laced with black foamy tendrils, and white, twisting, veins. Garak reaches.

He snaps awake with a little cry that is painful in his dry and ragged throat. He utters the noise again and scoots further away until his back thuds against a wall. Garak's heart is pounding. His eyes are wide. The moments just before dawn are hovering in sleepy gray layers outside the frame of his door. But there is something else too. Leaning in the doorway is a hunkering phantom. 

“Damar,” Garak breathes.

He doesn't know how he recognizes the figure—it is shadow cloaked, and death-distorted, but the eyes are the eyes of someone he knew.

The figure scuffles towards Garak. It breathes.

“You...” Damar growls.

Garak is certain that Damar's spirit has come to claim him. This is death, Garak thinks, and the fear drains away from him and he feels peaceful, and at ease. How pathetic that he would welcome it when he has waited so long to come home. How selfish that he would welcome the embrace and leave the bodies of the children to be entombed in a devastated dream—the broken remains of Cardassia.

“Elim,” the specter hisses.

“I tried my best to serve,” Garak whispers.

Damar drops to his knees in front of Garak's huddled form.

A claw-like hand uncurls.

Garak hesitates, then grips it. But it doesn't steal his breath, or stop his heart, or wipe out the fractured thing inside of his skull. Instead the darkness falls away to gray and Damar is with him—translucent--but formed.

Garak's mouth slides half-open in a deflated 'o' of surprise. 

“I was waiting,” Damar says, “I was supposed to wait. But I saw the hand... and I am a man of action.”

Garak and Damar seem to share a thought. It plays out before them as a single thing but seen through different sets of eyes. Damar leaping from the shadows, roaring, yelling, the cries for their homeland swelling around them and surging them forward into battle and a fight of twisting beams and the smell of burning air. The heavy fall of Damar into Garak's arms, the words that were left unsaid.

“Tell me,” Garak says, to this ghost, hallucination, whatever it really is or is not, “what is the after-life like, Damar?”

“It is waiting,” Damar says, “watching. The after-life... is darkness. It's a crevasse, a chasm, an ajan waiting to bring us back again. She is a Mother. We are her Children.”

Garak smiles subtly. A tinge at the edges of his mouth. Damar can see him remembering a man stooping in a garden, sifting soil through his fingers, lifting an old wooden mask, telling stories to the moon, and son. 

“Tolan,” Damar says.

“He followed the old ways,” Garak says, “he spoke of the Mother.”

“He was right.”

“But you're—” Garak begins.

“It's your fault for reaching. Its my fault for taking,” Damar says, “it wasn't time. The dead and the living... do not clasp hands through the split. The Mother's ajan. I forced my way out.”

“Only eggs are birthed, my dear,” Garak says.

“Not tonight,” Damar says, “but I need a nest. I am not ready to hatch. I'm cold.”

Garak stands with groaning knees. He takes Damar's hand. It feels like air in his and Garak can see his own palm through it, but Damar grips him and follows him to the corner of the shed where a cot stands clutching tangled blankets.

“Here,” Garak says, as the rain patters the rooftop above them. A few drops are leaking and Garak understands that he will need to climb up and patch it, but not now, not now. There are strange moments, things that cannot be explained, even by the sharpest Cardassian mind. 

Garak thinks it best to go back to bed. To wake from the dream. Then he will patch the roof, and dig in the rubble, and feel the cool slither of rain.

He lets Damar onto the cot first. Garak will not be crowded between a wall, and a Spirit, or whatever this Damar-thing could be. 

Damar presses his back to the wall. Garak slides in. He wraps the blankets around them and lets the warmth creep in.

-x-

Garak thinks that his dream, nightmare, hallucination—will be gone when he wakes up again. But he wakes to a cool phantom staring at him. Garak goes about his business. He talks to himself but he doesn't speak to Damar. Damar tries to talk to him but Garak only speaks over him, louder, more insistent, projecting his voice to try to drown out what he knows is just an illusion.

But after the third day Damar won't leave him alone. Garak turns to him and is angry for a moment, but more than that he is exhausted, and drained. His eyes are almost frantic, a long way from Obsidian Order chill, and Garak wishes for those younger, better, days when he was in control and the world was not such a damaged, chaotic, place.

“What do you want?” Garak hisses, “why are you here?”

Damar pushes his lip out a bit. Even in death he is pouting.

“Shouldn't you be with your family?” Garak spits the words knowing that they will hurt the other man. 

Damar flinches.

“They weren't there. The after-life seems... solitary,” Damar says, “maybe they were looking into another ajan somewhere. Or maybe Mirem and Domek have already been reborn. But I...”

“Yes?” Garak steps closer into Damar's personal space, tilts his head.

“I was waiting,” Damar says, “but now I'm here. I'm not supposed to be—but Cardassia needs me. I want to stay. I need to stay.”

Garak huffs.

“You're a hallucination. What do you think you're going to do for Cardassia?” Garak's anger rises again. He begins to bustle around his little shed-shack, straightening the few items he owns, grabbing a handmade broom, and trying his best to sweep some of the dust back out into the desert waste. 

“That night when I slept with you,” Damar says, “I felt your energy. I pulled on it a bit and I felt... more... here.”

“You were using my energy without asking? How delightful. Are you always so forward, Damar?” Garak continues to fight the dust with his broom.

The dust is winning.

“That's why I stopped,” Damar said, “but I think if you helped me... maybe I could ah... manifest... into a solid form. Maybe I could... live.”

Garak snorts.

“If that were true then why aren't there stories passed down all through Cardassia about loved ones who have haunted their relatives and sapped their energy to return to our plane? I think you're nothing but a product of my mind. The last thing I need to do is to make you more real,” Garak gives up on the dust and leans his broom in a corner. It looks like bones propped up and Garak turns away.

Damar is holding his hand out to Garak, palm up. 

“What are you doing, my dear?” Garak asks. His voice is sweet, and snappish, at the same time.

“Touch my hand,” Damar says.

“I don't think so. That's what got us into this mess to begin with,” Garak says.

He watches Damar's eyes beneath his ridges, cast into shadows, somehow hard and metallic as the low light catches the pale irises. 

“You're anxious,” Damar says, “full of nervous energy. Why not let me have some? It might calm you.”

“Me? Anxious!” Garak's voice pitches up too loud, “ha!” 

Garak jumps as a gust of dirty wind slams the door to his shack closed.

His eyes grow wider and his heart pounds. Garak lunges for the door and leans against it. It won't budge. He pushes, and tugs, and claws. At last he turns to Damar, pressing his back against the door, the panic of being shut into the tiny space creeping in on him like moving walls growing smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

“Damar, you're doing thisss,” Garak hisses, a dangerous edge to his voice. He can feel his blood thundering through the arteries beneath his neck ridges, he can hear it pound in his ears. “Open the door, Damar.”

Damar moves towards him, floats without his feet touching the ground, and offers his palm again, his chin pushed out and head tilted up in a classically stubborn gesture.

A growl tears out of Garak's throat and angrily, desperately, he slams his palm to Damar's and Damar's fingers curl through the gaps between his own. They fit together like teeth and Garak watches in awe as a thin, writhing, current, snakes from his palm into Damar's and passes through his translucent arm, up his shoulder, and there it branches out and goes up into his head, and down towards his heart, pulsing beneath the charred chula that bubbles and twists into a nasty scar. 

Garak's anxiety dulls down to minor hum. Damar's eyes lock with his, Garak nods, telling him silently to keep going a little longer. 

“There,” Garak says, and Damar breaks the hold.

Garak presses his hand to his chest. His heart is no longer pounding. He feels more like himself than he has for months. Still, he turns quickly and tries the door again, and now it opens for him easily. Garak props it open and drags a large stone in front to keep the door from closing again. He turns back to observe Damar. He's not as translucent as he was before and his eyes look different. There is no life in them, but they look more expressive, more 'there' than they had before. 

“How much energy do you think you'll need?” Garak asks.

“I have no way of knowing that,” Damar barks, “I've never been dead before... at least... not in this life.”

Garak circles Damar a few times. He is thinking. He is still trying to wrap his head around this. Garak has never been one to believe in the supernatural. Those sort of superstitions had been left up to Tolan, and the overly-religious Bajorans. Garak prefers to believe in what he can see, and even then, he does not trust anything entirely. 

But here is the hero Damar standing before him in some strange Spirit form, if Garak is to believe that this is something more than a hallucination. He still isn't convinced. Garak has hallucinated before so it seems more likely to him that this Damar is no Spirit, just a production of his own mind. He lifts his fingers and rubs the tips at his temple. A dull ache begins to manifest behind his eye.

Damar stays quiet for the rest of the evening.

The next morning Garak is working in the clinic alongside Dr. Parmak. His dear friend is looking thinner than usual and Garak suspects that he's been skimping on his rations and handing them out instead to the children. For a moment Garak sees the doctor as nothing more than shining bones moving around the shack of a clinic, treating wounds on children who are too dirty, and too thin too. Garak wonders for a moment if any of them are real. Maybe they're more hallucinations like the other children, and like Damar. It troubles him to think that he is having trouble telling the difference between reality and manifestations of psychological trauma. Garak watches the bone-doctor. He watches the children ooze blood from their eyes. He watches their skin crisp under the Cardassian sun and they shrink and shrivel into screaming, mummified, death. 

Garak turns away from them and closes his eyes. He tries to think about anything else—something beautiful—but it seems like he hasn't seen a beautiful thing for such a long time.

But then he remembers the turquoise crevasse. It was lovely, and beautiful, and warm when his hand had slid through. There had been light glowing softly behind it, gathered into faint little orbs, dancing and luring and somehow familiar. 

“Elim?”

Garak turns to the voice. It's Dr. Parmak. His flesh and skin are back on him and Garak sighs in relief. 

The doctor rests a small hand on Garak's bicep.

“Maybe you should go home and rest,” the doctor says in a gentle, even, tone. 

Garak thinks about telling him that Damar is waiting in his home. That his hallucination keeps asking for his energy. That Garak has thought these last few days that he might just give in and let Damar drain every last drop away. Garak gives a dark chuckle. He knows it will not do for him to give up now when has come so far. He knows he can't give in to the darkest parts of himself. He considers asking for another sedative, but is happy to realize that he's too proud to do so, and he thinks that his head will be clearer when the air isn't full of so much dust, and the rubble begins to look like order again. 

Instead of going home Garak wanders. He takes himself on a long walk that leads towards the rocky bases of a small mountain range that trails along the desert at this point. Against the gray sky the mountains are craggy like dangerous teeth and they want to devour. Garak sees the peaks for a moment dripping with dark Cardassian blood. He sits down on a boulder and wishes he would spot a regnar. At one time in his life one of them had given him quite a lot and he finds that he misses Mila now and would invite the comfort of the regnar's tiny feet skittering up his arm.

But Mila the regnar is not there. Instead there is Damar perching on a boulder next to him. Damar grins at him with blackened teeth. The look he gives to Garak is something vulgar and Damar's fingers go to his slit and push it open. A regnar with a half-eaten tail and a missing eye tumbles out of it and scampers towards Garak.

“Take it,” Damar says, “I want you to help me to live again, and I will stay and help you. Cardassia needs us.”

Garak stays still as the regnar crawls up his arm and buries itself at the back of his neck, beneath his dirty, tangled, hair. Damar is still fingering his slit open and now his prUt emerges thick, and slick, and bright. 

“I suppose you're right,” Garak says, “that fucking would create a lot of energy. It's... a good idea. But you're dead. I can still see through you in places—how would we even?”

“Why don't we find out?” Damar suggests, moving closer, and craning his neck. His head tilts at an unnatural angle and he grins at Garak in that smug, handsome, way. Even with hid blackened teeth, and hollow eyes, death could not rob Damar of his charm, Garak thinks. 

“Garak, lay down for me,” Damar says, pointing a gnarled finger at the sandy ground.

Garak decides to humor him and spreads himself out on the sun-warmed sand. Damar floats over to him. He pushes Garak's legs up, bending them at the knees, and then apart, and Damar settles in between them. Garak can half-feel his touches but they're still not really there. Garak opens his mouth to speak but Damar growls and suddenly around them the sand begins to yawn open in little mouths that curve around them in a circle. Up from the mouths giant cacti rise and tower above them. But they're pink and slick like prUt's, towering, dripping, rods covered in needles that are as long as Garak's forearm. Garak swallows around a knot in his throat. He thinks that being surrounded like this will set off his claustrophobia. Already he can feel the icy fingers of irrational fear dragging down his spine and clenching into fists deep in the pit of his belly. 

“Will you have me?” Damar asks. He drags a claw down one side of Garak's trousers slicing them along the seam. 

Garak gasps.

“Cardassia needs us,” Garak says. The prUts lean over them a bit more. They're almost touching at the top, almost closing in a dome-like structure, and gray spots of panic dance before Garak's eyes. He feels Damar's ghostly hands slide along his thighs. They're so chilly that Garak can hardly stand it. He keens and tips his head back. He squeezes his eyes closed. His hands grip the sand but it's too soft and the grains just slide through his fingers. 

“They're closing in on us!” Garak cries.

“For Cardassia,” Damar whispers, hisses, as he continues.

Garak can feel himself opening as though fingers are inside of him, but there are no fingers to feel. It's a very strange sensation and combining with his panic it makes him want to scream. Garak bites his tongue instead. He opens his eyes and tries to focus on Damar instead of the claustrophobic imagery above him. Damar has one hand between his legs. Garak can feel his hole opening a bit more. Damar lifts his other hand and he leans forward, pressing it to Garak's chula. Again the strange, spidery, current connects them. Garak feels it tug on the knotted coil of his panic and he realizes that Damar if feeding off of his claustrophobic attack now. Garak cries out—there is something pleasurable about the pull that Damar is exerting on that center of tension buried so deep within Garak's core. 

“Yesss,” Garak hisses. He spreads his legs wider. “Yes!”

Now he's even more opened than before. Garak still can't feel whatever is inside of him but he knows that it is Damar's prUt filling him up. The current crackles when they're joined and Damar leans forward again, pressing their chuva's together. The current binds them. Both of them cry out and Damar begins to rut.

Garak thrashes and cries with the intensity of this strange, spiritual, pleasure. There is sand caught in his hair and it sprays as he jerks his head from side to side like a wild thing. He has forgotten all about the prUt-like cacti that watch them fucking as though there are eyes on the heads of the giant stalks. 

Garak keeps his gaze trained on Damar. The harder they fuck, the clearer Damar's features become, the brighter the light, the greater the energy between them. Garak is rising and now the light is so bright that it hurts his eyes, it stabs like brutal daggers, but he can't seem to close them. Damar's face is glowing, the air around them is vibrating, humming, crying out--

Garak cums with the greatest orgasm he has ever known. It rockets through his body and bursts out of him on a silent, tear-streaked, scream. He flings his arms up and around Damar and there in his arms is a solid, trembling, man.

The light fades around them. The prUt-cacti slink back into the ground. The little mouths close. They are left in the sand and Damar's face is pressed into Garak's neck, and he is trembling, and he is alive.

He is alive.

-x-

When people ask Damar how he survived and why he took so long to return, he does not know what to say. He cannot tell them that he was dead. He can't explain to them what the afterlife was, and how Garak reached him through an altered state of mind, and how Damar was born again before his time. How he and Garak cheated his death together. 

Luckily Garak is more crafty and has created a cover-story. Damar memorizes it and parrots it with a practiced sincerity when he is asked and it seems that no one suspects the lie. Cardassia is simply glad to have him back. The people seem to feel stronger, and more hopeful, for his presence. 

He has been offered housing in one of the better-off cities where many political leaders have gathered. Damar will travel there for visits, to debate with the other politicians, to speak in the city center, to rouse the people to support the causes he deems worthy and to keep their spirits strong and willing to fight. He calls to them like none other and the force they make as they follow him, as they trust in him, as they weave their voices as one and shout 'For Cardassia' seems to transcend the destruction and give rise to a new hope. 

Damar does not accept the special housing. He speaks about how he is as Cardassian as anyone else, how he walks among the people, not above them as politicians have done in the past. He moves among the crowds that gather where he speaks, and he squeezes their hands, and he ruffles the hair of infants who will never know the same Cardassia that he had known. 

But maybe they will know a better one.

Damar stays with Garak. He helps Garak work on rebuilding his home. The bond between them is too strong now and though neither of them speak of it, they both know that they can not break it. Garak speaks to Damar without words, telling Damar that Damar owes him nothing—and Damar nods silently, and tells Garak that he knows, but that he wants to stay anyway. 

Sometimes when they fuck in the darkness, and the rain is pattering down above them, a static crack of light will still flicker between them as they come together. It reminds them of death—of the Jem'Hadar weapons firing and taking down the hero that Garak held in his arms. It reminds them of life—coupling in the desert and defying everything and bringing back what was meant to have passed.

“Maybe,” Damar says one night, as he rests his head against Garak's chest, “maybe nothing really dies. I saw the Mother, and I was waiting to be re-born. I don't know how it works—if it's only the deserving who come back, or if it's everyone, but maybe nothing really dies. There are only stages of transition and forming again and then life continues.”

“I didn't know you had it in you to think so deeply on such theoretical concepts,” Garak teases.

Damar grunts.

“I just want to think that Cardassia will be reborn again too.”

“It will,” Garak says.

He says it with such conviction that it can't possibly be a lie.

Garak cards his fingers through Damar's hair.

Years later they both find that Garak's words were true. Cardassia has lived and is even beginning to thrive again. Garak and Damar remain in their unspoken bond, and after awhile of badgering, Garak agrees to make the bond official.

“We forged a bond that defied even death, my dear,” Garak says, “what greater ceremony can there be?”

But Damar wants this so Garak allows it.

The old ways have come back into fashion and the new government is less heavy-handed than the old had been. Most major cities have at least one temple these days.

Damar and Garak are joined inside one of them, in a private ceremony. They wear robes of white and when the priest lifts the ceremonial cup, they each dip their fingers into it, and paint turquoise streaks onto each others faces.

They share a thought: reaching to each other through that swirling crevasse, and they think that even this priest of Oralius can never know just what this ceremonial color truly means.

It is waiting, it is watching, and it is life: again, and again, and again.


End file.
